The battle for the future of the Open Web is taking place as a new document model merges into a platform for highly graphical, interactive and information rich applications. Open source communities vie with dominant vendors Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Nokia and Google to stake out their claims as open source innovations collide with standards consortia and proprietary alternatives.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Very interesting article from WSJ on the eve of the FaceBook IPO. Karlgaard claims that in Silicon Valley, social networking is last years story. The innovators have moved on to really important stuff, "big stuff", like transportation, energy, electricity, food production, water delivery, health care and education.
Killer quote: In Silicon Valley, investing in social-media companies is already passé. Last year, as private investors were bidding up Facebook's valuation to $100 billion, the veteran Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee said "the next 500 social-media companies will lose money." He's broadly right. The time to make big returns in Facebook and in social media has passed..........
Karlsgard argues that the future belongs to the algorythm engineers, and the magic they make. He sights the incredibly rapid development of the Google Car, concluding that "This rate of progress is normal in the algorithmic world, but it is new in the physical world." Silicon Valley is where the great algorithms engineers put their genius to the test. It's still where money meets magic, and algorithms get to whip saw reality.
first up: Manufacturing and Energy.
excerpts:
Social media is already passé in Silicon Valley. America's innovation engine is now focused on transportation, energy and manufacturing.
In March 1986, Microsoft ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of $780 million. Its value grew more than 700 times that over the next 13 years and made Bill Gates, in 1999, the richest man ever with a net worth of $101 billion. When Facebook goes public this Friday its market cap could easily hit $100 billion, bringing founder Mark Zuckerberg's net worth to more than $18 billion. That's about 50 times what Mr. Gates was worth after Microsoft's IPO.
Facebook's big payday should be cause for celebration in a liberal democracy. Instead it has provoked two kinds of anxiety. Both imply America's best days are over.

"We've put it in a user-installable module. The user buys the card and just plugs it into any device that has a slot," Fiennes explained." All a developer needs to do is add a socket and a 3-pin Atmel ID chip to their product. That's 75 cents: 30 cents for the ID chip and 45 cents for the socket." This assumes the availability of 3.3 V. "But given that most things you want to control from the Internet are electrical, we think that's reasonable," he said. If not, developers can include a battery.

Fiennes demonstrated a power adaptor with an Imp socket. He installed a card and an appropriately labeled block appeared in a browser window. Fiennes plugged in a chain of decorative lights and we clicked on the box on our browser. After clicking, the box text went from "off" to "on." Over Skype, we could see the lights had come on.

Fiennes emphasized that control need not be manual and could be linked to other Internet apps such as weather reports, or to Electric Imp sensor nodes that monitor conditions such as humidity.

A second example is an Electric Imp enabled passive infrared sensor. Fiennes demonstrated how it could be programmed to report the time and date of detected motion to a client's Web pages on the Electric Imp server. In turn, those pages could be programmed to send an alarm to a mobile phone. The alarm could also be triggered if no motion was detected, allowing the sensor to serve as a monitor for the elderly in their homes, for example. If there is no activity before 9 a.m., a message is sent to a caregiver.

The final example is an Electric Imp washing machine. Machine operation can be made conditional on a number of variables, including the price of electricity. "Every washing machine has microcontroller and that microcontroller has a lot of data," said Fiennes. "That data could be sent back to a washing machine service organization that could call the client up before the washing machine breaks down."

The cards will be on sale to developers by the end of June for $25 each and Electric Imp will also supply development kits that include a socket, ID chip and power connection on a small board for about $10. While these are intended for consumer electronics developers Electric Imp is happy to sell them to students and non-professional developers. "Hobbyists can play with it and tell us what they think."

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

After reading this article i gave engag.io a try. It's very simple to sign up different networks like Facebook, Disquis, Tweeter, G+, Tumblr, LinkedIN and FourSquare. But there doesn't seem to be a way to add my bookmarking network, Diigo? Still, Engagio looks like a very useful service. No idea how they plan on making money :)
excerpt:
The killer app for the social Web is the one that will filter the signal from the noise. In the Facebook age, even casual Web users hold tons of conversations at once. Engagio, the conversation discovery company, pulls them all into one place. It also leads you into new ones. And with a new dashboard view released today, it lets you click one button to figure out what's actually going on in all these conversations.
Engagio's dashboard breaks out articles, sites and other links from all your social networks into separate panels, and lets you reply, share and like straight from there. But the best part of this section is the "context" button.

Nice infographic! Shows that great transition from Windows desktop client/server to Cloud Computing is well underway. I've tried RingCentral, and it's very good. But i much prefer Google Voice - especially since i have an HTC Android. RingCentral only offers one advantage over gVoice; they have integrated fax. Everything else about RingCentral seemed like a throwback to DOS applications.
gVoice is slowly evolving. Seems like it's taking forever to complete the integration with gMail, gSearch, and gDocs. But i can see the incredible potential of Cloud integrated communications, content and collaborative computing. gVoice has a potential like no one else.
excerpt:
The results are in from our annual smartphone survey! We polled 300 RingCentral SMB customers about their mobile device adoption and cloud use. The key takeaway: 57% of business owners said the majority of their business-critical applications currently run in the cloud.

Fascinating conversation between Douglas Crockford and Jeremy Geelan. The issue is that XSS - the Cross Site Scripting capabilities of HTML. and "the painful gap" in the HTML5 specification of the itnerface between JavaScript and the browser.I had to use the Evernote Clearly Chrome extension to read this page. Microsoft is running a huge JavaScript advertisement/pointer that totally blocks the page with no way of closing or escaping. Incredible. Clearly was able to knock it out though. Nicely done!The HTML5-XSS problem is very important, especially if your someone like me that sees the HTML+ format (HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript-SVG/Canvas) as the undisputed Cloud Productivity Platform "compound document" model. The XSS discussion goes right to the heart of matter of creating an HTML compound document in much the same way that a MSOffice Productivity Compound Document worked. The XSS mimics the functionality of of embedded compound document components such as OLE, DDE, ODBC and Scripting. Crack open any client/server business document and it will be found to be loaded with these embeded components.It seems to me that any one of the Cloud Productivity Platform contenders could solve the HTML-XSS problem. I'm thinking Google Apps, Zoho, SalesForce.com, RackSpace and Amazon - with gApps and Zoho clearly leading the charge. Also let me add that RSS and XMP (Jabber), while not normally mentioned with JSON, ought to be considered. Twitter uses RSS to transport and connect data. Jabber is of course a long time favorite of mine.excerpt:The fundamental mistake in HTML5 was one of prioritization. It should have tackled the browser's most important problem first. Once the platform was secured, then shiny new features could be carefully added.There is much that is attractive about HTML5. But ultimately the thing that made the browser into a credible application delivery system was JavaScript, the ultimate workaround tool. There is a painful gap in the specification of the interface between JavaScript and the browser, and that is a source of XSS and other maladies. The responsible course of action was to correct that defect first.That course is still available to us. My recommendation is that we suspend the current HTML5 activity. We start over with a new charter: To quickly and effectively repair the XSS vulnerability. Then we can mine the bloated HTML5 set for features that have high value and which do not introduce new security vulnerabilities.HTML5 has a lot of momentum and appears to be doomed to succeed. I think the wiser course is to get it right first. We have learned the hard way that once an error gets into a web standard, it is really hard to get it out.

Nice catch by Jason. The lesson learned is one we've seen time and again.
excerpt:
Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.
This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.
Do you remember Flickr's tag line? It reads "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement.
Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr.
Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.

Friday, May 11, 2012

Excellent Hadoop/Hive explanation. Hat tip to Matt Asay for the link. I eft a comment on Matt's blog questioning the consequences of the Oracle vs. Google Android lawsuit, and the possible enforcement of the Java API copyright claim against Hadoop/Hive. Based on this explanation of Hadoop/Hive, i'm wondering if Oracle is making a move to claim the entire era of Big Data Cloud Computing? To understand why, it's first necessary to read Matt the Hadoople's explanation.
kill shot excerpt:
"You've built your Hadoop job, and have successfully processed the data. You've generated some structured output, and that resides on HDFS. Naturally you want to run some reports, so you load your data into a MySQL or an Oracle database. Problem is, the data is large. In fact it's so large that when you try to run a query against the table you've just created, your database begins to cry. If you listen to its sobs, you'll probably hear "I was built to process Megabytes, maybe Gigabytes of data. Not Terabytes. Not Perabytes. That's not my job. I was built in the 80's and 90's, back when floppy drives were used. Just leave me alone".
"This is where Hive comes to the rescue. Hive lets you run an SQL statement against structured data stored on HDFS. When you issue an SQL query, it parses it, and translates it into a Java Map/Reduce job, which is then executed on your data. Although Hive does some optimizations, in general it just goes record by record against all your data. This means that it's relatively slow - a typical Hive query takes 5 or 10 minutes to complete, depending on how much data you have. However, that's what makes it effective. Unlike a relational database, you don't waste time on query optimization, adding indexes, etc. Instead, what keeps the processing time down is the fact that the query is run on all machines in your Hadoop cluster, and the scalability is taken care of for you."
"Hive is extremely useful in data-warehousing kind of scenarios. You would never use Hive as a database for a web application, because the response time is always in minutes, not seconds. However, for generating huge custom reports, running some really expensive query on year's worth of data, or doing any kind of processing on massive amounts of data, Hive really shines. This is why companies like Oracle and IBM (IBM owns Netezza, a competitor to Oracle) are scared of Hadoop and Hive. Hive makes it possible for companies to easily process massive amounts of data, and processing massive amounts of data is typically how database makers differentiate themselves. And yes, just like the rest of Hadoop ecosystem, Hive is free and open-source." ...........

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Interesting article describing a recent press conference where Microsoft introduced their latest SkyDrive alternative to Apple's iCloud initiative. Having had considerable experience with SkyDrive and the entire "sync-share-store" Cloud category, I left a lengthy comment.
Computerworld - Microsoft is pitching its SkyDrive online storage service to Office for Mac users, calling Apple's iCloud offering "not enough" for collaboration, file sharing and anywhere-access to documents.
Microsoft released an OS X SkyDrive client preview two weeks ago, adding Macs to the list of devices -- Windows, particularly the upcoming Windows 8, iOS and Windows Phone -- with native support for the Dropbox-like service.
On Monday, the Redmond, Wash. developer stumped for SkyDrive on its Office for Mac website.
"With the SkyDrive for Mac OS X Lion preview, SkyDrive for Windows, and the release of SkyDrive for iPad, you can save and store your important documents or other files in the SkyDrive folder in Finder and access them from anywhere," the Office for Mac team wrote on its blog.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Excellent legal piece explaining the options and methods of how software programs use licensed and copyrighted third party libraries through an API. Finally, some clear thinking about Google Android and the Oracle Java Law Suit.excerpt:Another option for a developer is to do what Google did when it created Android, and create replacement code libraries that are compatible with the existing code libraries, but which are new copyrighted works. Being "compatible" in this context means that the new libraries are called in the same way that the old libraries are--that is, using the same APIs. But the actual copyrighted code that is being called is a new work. As long as the new developer didn't actually copy code from the original libraries, the new libraries are not infringing. It does not infringe on the copyright of a piece of software to create a new piece of software that works the same way; copyright protects the actual expression (lines of code) but not the functionality of a program. The functionality of a program is protected by patent, or not at all.In the Oracle/Google case, no one is arguing that code libraries themselves are not copyrightable. Of course they are and this is why the Google/Oracle dispute has no bearing on the enforceability of the GPL. Instead, the argument is about whether the method of using a code library, the APIs, is subject to a copyright that is independent of the copyright of the code itself. If the argument that APIs are not copyrightable prevails, programs that are created by statically-linking GPL'd code libraries will still be considered derivative works of the code libraries and will still have to be released under the GPL.Though irrelevant to the enforceability of the GPL, the Oracle/Google dispute is still interesting. Oracle is claiming that Google, by creating compatible, replacement code libraries that are "called" in the same way as Oracle's code libraries (that is, using the same APIs), infringed on some kind of copyright that inheres in the APIs themselves. This means that Oracle is claiming copyright not on the unique creative expression of its code libraries, but on the functionality of the libraries. Oracle is saying that to make a piece of software that is "API-compatible" with another product, without more, constitutes copyright infringement...................